The Long Road Towards Independence, Justice and Peace for the Basque Country

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Enough is Enough!

One of the strongest motivations behind this Blog is the sense of duty I feel towards shedding light on what is happening to the Basque people.

For decades there the Spanish government ran a successful campaign of misinformation of everything Basque, knowing well that it is just impossible for people around the world to keep up with everything that is going on in the planet they were able to create a series of fake concepts about the Basque society and the history of the Basque Country.

They took advantage for the longest time, and people like me had no way of communicating our concerns on a broad basis, then along came the internet and a lot changed.

What happened yesterday reminded me of why it is so urgent that the international community start looking into the so called Basque conflict as soon as possible.

The name Ainara Gorostiaga may not mean a whole lot to you, Ainara like many other Basques believes in the right to the self determination of her people, and like many others like her, Ainara ended up in jail accused of belonging to ETA. She was not convicted in the act of committing a crime, nor was she arrested after a thorough investigation that yielded enough evidence to indict her. No, she was abducted by a judicial system that accused her of terrorism just because she was an active exponent of the Basque struggle.

Two years later she was released after being held incommunicado and tortured, she was in jail awaiting a trial based solely on the confessions they extracted from her during the "questionings" she was subjected to, she and other three people were accused of killing a politician. Then, in France they captured a real ETA member that led the French police to the real authors of that assassination, and so the sorry ass excuse of a judge by the name of Baltasar Garzon ordered her free.

So, in Spain, a regime that is identified by many as a democracy you are guilty until proven innocent. That is why it is so urgent that the international community moves to stop events like this from taking place. Madrid is on a vendetta against Basque self determination.

The depths of this ill conceived campaign against the Basques were exposed by the fatal bombings in Madrid a couple of weeks ago. The Spanish official went to the extreme of providing the German intelligence with false information on their obsession in blaming ETA for the bombings just for political gains. Lets not forget that the Saudi Arabs that destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon in September of 2001 had support from a terrorist cell in Germany, and that Germany has troops deployed in Afghanistan which makes them targets of Bin Laden's wrath. The Spanish official could care less about that, they wanted to pin the bombings on ETA and they were as far as misleading their European allies which could have resulted on more attacks around European capitals since the intelligence agencies were thinking it was a domestic problem. How idiotic can that be!

The "International Basque Organization for Human Rights" has ongoing campaigns in defense of Basques incarcerated both in Spain and around the world, they are people that share their love for their country and that today are behind bars on flimsy accusations by a regime very willing to lie, just to mention a few examples there is six Basques down in Mexico City that stand accused as a cell that was laundering money for ETA in Mexico, then there is Josu Lariz who was abducted from Uruguay after that South American country had denied his extradition to Spain, Josu is now on a cell in Argentina and could be extradited at any time. Xarlo Etxezaharreta sits in a cell in Spain, he is a French citizen for the virtue of having been born in Iparralde, the Northen Basque Country which is under French administration, yet, he was abducted in Spain without a warrant against him just for being the director of a leftist and pro-Basque magazine.

Like them, there is many more, their lives destroyed by a regime that refuses to acknowledge the right of the Basques to their self determination.